As ever in a short press article our views are not necessarily presented in their full and proper context; nonetheless the two key points we were making in this small section of our submission do seem to have lodged and are broadly covered off in the article. These are that:

the difficult nature and scale of the task of attracting significantly more additional overseas visitors to visit the rest of the UK in addition and/or in preference to London shouldn’t be underestimated nor assumed to be a panacea.

actions to attract additional international visitors to visit outside London shouldn’t be done at significant cost to the support given to domestic tourism market.

Essential if attracting more international visitors and spreading them beyond London (and a few established international honey pots) is worth doing at scale and that has to be questioned, then it needs to be done with new and additional funding and not at the direct expense of existing international, or especially the core domestic tourism support activities that help underpins the bulk of the visitor economy, across the majority of the UK. Put more simply without a healthy domestic visitor economy there would be that much for international visitors to see and do in the majority of our successful destinations outside London.